The Transplantation Journal on Social Media

Get viewed, get cited: The Impact of a Social Media strategy of @TransplantJrnl In the past 2 years, Transplantation has become the leading transplant journal with respect to social media. The journal is particularly active on Twitter (@TransplantJrnl). Our social media activity has been recognized and appreciated by the transplantation community. In this period, we experienced a sevenfold increase in followers, and Transplantation is now connected with over 2600 followers. Via Twitter, the journal interacts with transplant professionals ie, clinicians, basic scientists, nurses, transplant coordinators, scientific societies, and health representatives from all over the world. Thirty percent of our followers are from North America, 30% is based in Europe, and the other 30% come from various parts of the globe, from Mexico, India to Australia. In 2014, when we started, our aim was to improve engagement with our readership and to connect to our authors by providing them a platform that supports research in an interactive way.1 In addition, we used social media to announce special promotions, such a free articles and awards, as well as to boost brand awareness. @TransplantJrnl has posted 3647 tweets, and we here present the impact of these tweets on the number of views and downloads as a measure of engagement with our journal. As can be seen in the figures, the impact is enormous and much greater than we anticipated. For example, articles published in 2015 (volume 99) were downloaded 3 times more often when they were tweeted (p < 0.001, Figure 1) compared to nontweeted articles. Of our top 50 downloaded articles, 17 (34%) had social media attention (Figure 2). The 2 tweeted articles with most views are reports on (i) “the prognostic significance of creeping proteinuria in the first year after transplantation”, and (ii) “multivariable regression models in clinical transplant research: principles and pitfalls” that both have broad interest of many in the transplantation community.2,3 Of course, these statistics are influenced by the selection of articles that are deemed suitable for Twitter by the Social Media Editor. Articles are being selected based on their content. But apart from their content, articles with colourful images are attractive to post, and will likely get more attention.FIGURE 1: Number of downloads and views of the 2015 published articles (volume 99) determined per November 2016. Comparison of articles posted on @TransplantJrnl. Tweeted articles were significantly more often downloaded and/or viewed than nontweeted articles, P < 0.0001, Mann Whitney test.FIGURE 2: Impact of Twitter on the most downloaded and/or viewed articles. Seventeen (34%) of the 50 most downloaded and/or viewed articles in 2015 (volume 99) were tweeted.One way of measuring impact on social media is the Klout Score (www.kloutscore.com). The Klout Score is a number between 1-100 that is composed of multiple measurements across social media networks and represents influence. The more influential an individual is, the higher the Klout Score.4Transplantation currently has a Klout Score of 46. For authors, it is important to realize that a “tweeted” article will be viewed within a very short time by a large target audience, and can then be shared with their respective extended networks. In only a few clicks on a smart phone or tablet the message of a article can reach hundreds if not thousands people with interest in their work.5,6 Therefore, a post should be attractive and convey the message in seconds, also because social media is checked when people have a break, drink a coffee, or are waiting in the operating room. Furthermore, this quantitative impact is the beginning of a chain reaction that not only stimulates the number of downloads or views; it will translate into increased citation rates of the published article and enlarge networks. Social media posts of scientific work will be picked up by more traditional media as well and lead to an even bigger impact. Transplantation started using Altmetrics to measure the influence of individual articles in the field. Altmetrics are metrics and qualitative data that are complementary to traditional, citation-based metrics. They can include (but are not limited to) peer reviews on Faculty of 1000, citations on Wikipedia and in public policy documents, discussions on research blogs, mainstream media coverage, bookmarks on reference managers like Mendeley, and mentions on social networks such as Twitter. Sourced from the Web, altmetrics can tell you a lot about how often journal articles are discussed and used world-wide. Next to the classical tweets about recently published articles the journal initiated “PresentYourPaper” for young authors (<40 year old) to present their article once accepted for publication in our journal during a 1 minute video. These videos, filmed by a smart phone or camera, and shared through Twitter, offer maximal exposure for scientific work using the @TransplantJrnl's network.7 Each month, 1 or 2 these videos are posted. This also generated increased traffic to our website with 15% on the day of posting. We encourage all transplant professionals, and especially (young) authors to create a Twitter account, post data and other interesting transplantation-related items to engage with our active community, and mingle with our scientific community. It will help you to expose your research, to further expand the network that will put your work to the forefront. Overall, for Transplantation and Transplantation Direct, the impact of Twitter is tremendous, and is much greater than first anticipated, and is used for to sharing data, pictures, videos, and information. We strongly believe it should be used more by transplant professionals to engage with peers, media, and the general public. The exact impact on eventual citations is not yet known,6,8,9 but the general impact is incredible.